Here, a molded body surface should be taken to mean any area or surface on a substrate of any design or on a molded body of any shape and dimensions.
For reasons connected with weight optimization, substrates and/or molded bodies are often formed from plastics. Correspondingly weight-optimized substrates and/or molded bodies can however also have a reduced stability. To increase stability, the substrates and/or molded bodies can be provided with a reinforcing structure. This reinforcing structure can be formed from fiber-reinforced thermosetting or thermoplastic materials, for example.
One example of a molded body or substrate is an inner container of a pressurized container. The inner container can be formed from a thermoplastic material, for example, or it can at least include a thermoplastic material. Pressurized containers are used to store pressurized gases and/or pressurized liquids. Thus, pressurized containers are already being used in motor vehicles operated on natural gas. Pressurized containers which are filled with pressurized hydrogen are furthermore known for motor vehicles. The hydrogen can be burned with oxygen in an internal combustion engine or can react with oxygen in a fuel cell to form water, wherein the electric energy obtained is fed to an accumulator or to an electric motor.
Corresponding pressurized containers must withstand high loads. Pressurized containers for natural gas are charged with a pressure of up to 250 bar, for example. Pressurized containers for hydrogen are charged with a pressure of up to 700 bar. The pressurized inner containers which form the interior of a pressurized container of this kind and are formed from a thermoplastic material, for example, must therefore be provided with an outer supporting structure which allows reinforcement of the pressurized inner container, ensuring that the pressurized container can withstand pressure loads of up to 700 bar.
The prior art has disclosed the practice of applying a supporting structure composed of thermoplastic material to a molded body, wherein the thermoplastic material can be of fiber-reinforced form, in particular reinforced with carbon fibers. In this case, a reliable and stable connection between the molded body and the supporting structure is necessary.
Thus, U.S. Pat. No. 6,451,152 describes a method for producing plastic articles from a plastic strip. For this purpose, opposite surfaces of a plastic strip and of a substrate are subjected to light radiation and are heated, wherein the light radiation is emitted by an edge emitter laser diode array. The laser light emitted by the edge emitter laser diode array has in this case, owing to the construction, a large divergence angle, such that imaging optics are arranged between the edge emitter laser diode array and the surfaces to be irradiated, in order that the intensities required for the heating of the surfaces can be achieved. In order that the plastic strip adheres to the substrate, the plastic strip is pressed onto the surface of the substrate by means of a contact pressure unit. According to the description of U.S. Pat. No. 6,451,152, the surfaces of the plastic strip and of the substrate can be locally irradiated with appropriate intensities, with the result that, in the case of application of the plastic strip to the substrate over a curve, the region of the plastic strip on the inside of the curve is heated more strongly to ensure that the plastic strip can be deposited on the substrate and joined to the latter more effectively in curved form.